A look of extreme distaste crossed her face. “I’m a marine, old man!” she shouted at him. She stepped forward and swung a skull-cracking arc at his head.
Apparently negotiation was not an option.
Ivor swung up his arm to block the blow with the thigh-piece from Hougland’s armor. The two met with a crack and Hougland looked surprised.
“All my age means, girl, is I’ve got a dozen years combat experience on you.”
Ivor kicked out with his right foot, spraying deadwood shrapnel at Hougland. She fell back, still holding on to her club, and Ivor had to make a complicated hopping dance to keep his footing as he stumbled down the front of the deadfall.
By the time Ivor was on solid ground again, Hougland had gotten up and was brandishing her log at him.
“You realize—”
She interrupted him with a sweep that he had to parry.
“—that this is pointless. This whole operation is in other hands now.”
Sweep, block.
“Whatever happens, it’ll be over before either of us can do anything.”
A lie, but who was counting?
She pulled an obvious feint—however well someone’s trained, a log is still an unsubtle weapon—and lunged to slam him in the groin. Ivor danced aside.
Enough was enough. Old man or not, he needed those.
Her next swing he made to block again with the thigh armor, but instead of blocking it, he let it glance off the armor and slip inside his guard. The log slammed into his side at a rib-bruising velocity. Before she could recover the log, Ivor wrapped his arm around it and held.
He grabbed it so hard that he thought he could feel the muscles in his arm tear. Hougland wasn’t expecting that, and she froze for a second.
“Playtime’s over.” Ivor shot a vicious kick at Hougland’s midsection, doubling her over. “Time for bed.” Ivor backhanded her with his left fist as hard as he could. Her head snapped back and she fell, nose and mouth bloody.
As she fell back, Ivor tossed the log aside. The right side of his body felt like a gigantic bruise.
While Hougland was still dazed, Ivor grabbed her wrists and bound them together with his belt. Then he tossed her over his left shoulder and started back toward the bolt-hole. Ivor thought of the sixty-meter climb down the scaffolding and thought, This isn’t going to be easy.
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Securities Exchange
“Seeing is believing, but belief doesn’t amount to much.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Don’t assume you know anyone.”
—Sylvia Harper
(2008-2081)
07:11:00 Godwin Local
It was amazing how little everything seemed to have changed. The patrols, the guard towers, the Blood-Tide, all were just as Shane had left them. It was an eerie sensation. ...
Hell, if it feels odd to me, I wonder how Dominic feels.
That thought brought the predictable internal debate about just who here was on the side of the angels. Shane was slowly coming to the decision that if God had any brains at all, he had washed his divine hands of all of this long ago. Her drill sergeant had once yelled at her, after a particularly nasty battle simulation, that there were no good guys or bad guys, only fuckups and survivors—
What are you, Shane?
God, she could still remember his breath.
Why did she agree to this?
She tried to lock her mind back in the present. She checked the timer; it was twenty seconds after the last time she looked. Seemed longer.
The entire quad between the residence tower and the offices was bare of people. That would last another one and a half minutes. She glanced toward the nose gear and looked for Mosasa. She could find him, if she stared.
Mosasa had cooked up another toy for this job, in addition to her stunner and her transponder. He had built a personal cloaking field. Shane was sure that somewhere in the toy stores of the Confed Intel community there were much more advanced versions of what Mosasa had cobbled together. The principle was simple enough. Key an Emerson field for wide spectrum interference and cover the hole with a holo projection. Simple it was, but there were some major problems with it.
First was power consumption. The wider the range of wavelengths an Emerson field screened, the greater the power consumption—exponentially. A normal personal field relied on software and feedback from the screen itself to shift to whatever wavelength seemed threatening. The cells for a standard personal field could last for sixteen hours of continuous operation. With Mosasa adjusting his field to suck up the visible spectrum and into the UV and IR, he had ten minutes.
The other problem was the holo cameras and projectors which, obviously, had to project beyond the field to do any good. The little pea-sized cameras and projectors bounced outside the perimeter of the field on hair-thin wires. They not only provided the data for the cloaking holo projection, they also allowed Mosasa to see.
It took Mosasa one day to pull it all together, and the damn thing worked. Right now she was staring right at him—but what she saw seemed more like some floating pocket of denser air. The apparent refraction and heat shimmer, sometimes at right angles to the holo projection, sometimes looking reflective rather than transparent, made Mosasa look like a mirage or a trick of the light.
Shane stared and could barely see the cameras hovering over nothing.
The sight gave her a headache.
Mosasa was halfway up the landing gear, doing things to the Blood-Tide’s field control system. After a few seconds Mosasa said, “Step out from under the ship. I have the diameter programmed, but there might be some bleed-through.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me, just clear the ship. Ten seconds.”
Shane moved out from under the Blood-Tide and around to the boarding ramp in the nose. She kept her eye on the timer in the corner of her headsup as she turned to face the ship.
07:13:08 ...
07:13:09 ...
07:13:10 ...
Right on time, a warning light came on in her display. A too-weak neural stun field had washed by her, diminished by its expanding radius. Damn it, Mosasa was right next to it. Shane started for the landing gear and a voice near her wrist said, “What are you doing?”
It was Random’s briefcase.
“I thought you were off,” she whispered, making sure the suit’s comm was still off.
“You turn off your brain just because you have nothing to do at the moment?”
“I was going—”
“I know where you were going. Don’t worry about Mosasa; it was part of the calculations. A ship field control has a wide tolerance for the field diameter. He had to push the programming five meters past the skin of the ship. He’s fine.”
“But—”
“Get up the ramp!”
It was a choice between taking Random’s word and possibly blowing the most closely timed part of the operation.
Fuckup, or survivor?
“You better be right, Random.”